8:00 AM PST came too quickly today as I walked in a minute or two late to the Jumbo Regions-National Board of Directors meeting. This meeting is designed for the REs of the Jumbo Regions to get together with the BoD and discuss the issues that they face collectively. A lot of times, what one Jumbo Region faces, another one does as well, so this forum can be valuable for all involved. This year’s topics were rather broad.
The Runoffs – This has been the hot topic this convention, with the biggest question gone unanswered: do you want quantity or quality? Only the BoD can answer that question!
2-day National events – Three day Club Racing events, such as double Nationals, are really difficult to staff with workers unless it’s a 3 day weekend, and there aren't a plethora of those. Meanwhile, the drivers love them because they feel they get more bang for their buck (provided they finish). So how can we get double Nationals down to 2 days? Can practice and qualifying being reduced? Can we change the fact that there is no flexibility in the structure of a National race or are Regions going to have to start using The Phantom Run Group to create the flexibility that they need? What’s a Phantom Run Group, you ask? It’s when you don’t have enough cars to fill 5 run groups, so you fill 4 run groups with cars, and drop the green flag on a set of non-existent (phantom) cars and 2 seconds thereafter, send out the phantom EV crew to clean up the phantom mess and then 2 seconds after that, drop the phantom checkered flag. All done in the name of “Because you have to have 5 run groups, and the National rules are inflexible. I realize that's not the whole picture, but I wanted to get those thoughts out there.
PDX events are thriving in Chicago and Atlanta (and WDCR), but not so much in New England, San Francisco and one of the Florida regions. About half of the Jumbo Regions are holding PDX events, and some are seeing a conversion to club racing from PDX. Maybe there is a way to offset costs during PDX downtime and allowing Club Racing School students get their track time in towards their competition license.
Solo fees are too high in comparison (between Sanction, Insurance, and the Solo/Rally Tax –-> Weekend Memberships) to other clubs, and the Jumbo Regions are having trouble competing because “our event is better” isn’t necessarily the case anymore. The REs were tasked with finding out what other competing events cost and supply the information to National for their analysis.
RallyCross is BOOMING in the New England region. They had 89 cars at their event 2 weeks ago!! They use the winter months as prime RallyX event time because everyone is bored and looking for a way to fulfill their competitive itch. RallyX (even in the snow) seems to fit the bill!!
At 10:45 AM PST, I was herded into an impromptu meeting of the members of the NEDiv that were at the convention to talk about the NEDiv’s National (Club) Racing crisis. Anyway, attendees included members of the NEDiv Council, the NEDiv’s Area Directors, and the REs. This was my first meeting with members of the NEDiv’s braintrust which was … eye opening. I’ll leave it at that for now.
Ultimately, we solved nothing (surprise!), but a lot of important conversation was had (which apparently did not happen during the November Mini-Con meeting). The bottom line is that the NEDiv’s racing regions are tasked with coming back to each other with solutions for the problem for the 2011 season.
My personal feeling is that at some level, this needs to remain a pain point because it will force the NEDiv to deal with the issues and come up with a plan of attack.
The rest of my day was spent contemplating all that I had heard. This is a lot to absorb and analyze!
Oh, and for what it’s worth, lunch was some type of super-squished mystery meat pretending to be meatloaf. Gotta love banquet food.
Cheers!
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-Evanthe
Don’t drive faster than your angel can fly.